The Listeners

by Monica Dickens

  ‘So did I. Let’s go to the cinema some time, Billie, you and me. Shall we? It would be nice to meet.’

  Billie stared at the tilted mirror, and the Billie that Victoria would meet stared glumly back.

  No fear.

  ‘Dear Mrs King, ... should like you to attend the first preparation class at the Samaritan Centre at 6.30...’The date had hung before Sarah like a prize, foreshortening the days between.

  ‘Where are you going, my Sarah?’

  ‘I told you. It’s the first preparation class.’

  ‘Is that why you’re wearing a gym tunic?’

  ‘It’s called a jerkin. Can I have the car?’

  ‘Yes, darling.’ Brian clutched her. ‘Don’t go.’

  ‘That’s not fair. Wait till I get home.’

  ‘What makes you think I’ll still want you?’

  ‘You’d better.’

  They talked like this about sex. It wasn’t very real. But it was better than people who never talked about it at all, just did it.

  The class was held in the big downstairs room at the Samaritan Centre. Clients who came in that evening had to go upstairs, When Sarah went in, the wide hall was full of people in coats, all ages and types, looking confused. You could not tell if they had come for the class or to get help. Two girls were taking chairs into the big room, and presently everyone was in there, about a dozen people facing the desk at the back, where a youngish man with receding hair was looking carefully over the group as if it were a cattle auction.

  ‘Is it a meeting?’ whispered a young man who had come in with the others from the hall and sat down next to Sarah.

  ‘It’s a class for volunteers. Are you one?’

  ‘Well, actually.’ The young man desperately tried to find one tiny piece more nail to bite. ‘I’m supposed to be seeing someone called Ralph. I talked to him on the phone yesterday. Ralph, 255, he said.’

  ‘We could ask him.’ Sarah nodded to the man behind the desk, who was waiting while people scraped chairs and took off coats and lit cigarettes and were extraordinarily polite to each other, like examination candidates not knowing yet who would pass and who fail.

  ‘I am one of the deputy directors of this branch of the Samaritans.’ The man at the desk stood up. ‘You can call me 200. We use Christian names and numbers, see, but with a name like mine, I just use a number.’

  Sycophantic laughter from a perpetually smiling lady with her head on one side. If she thought that would get her into the Samaritans...”

  The young man looked anguished, so Sarah stood up and explained.

  ‘Ralph? Oh yes, he’s upstairs.’

  ‘Shall I take him? I know the way.’

  ‘Thanks. That would be fine.’

  Sarah took the young man out, and handed him over to a Samaritan at the top of the stairs. Sarah King? Oh yes, that’s the girl who was helpful her very first day. Good sign that.

  She went quietly back into the room. 200 had started to talk, head back, reading the ceiling for words. He did not notice her come in.

  ‘If you want statistics,’ he said, ‘you can look them up. I can’t be bothered with them. They don’t make pictures for me, and I don’t suppose they do for you either.’ He brought his eyes down and set them on a restless woman in a sleek fur jacket like a labrador, without apparently seeing her. ‘People kill themselves. For some reason – well, for obvious reasons, I suppose, seeing what a mullock we’ve made of the world – suicide is increasing. A thousand a day, they reckon. And about eight thousand try it.’

  The lady with her smiling head on one side shook it gently to show she cared.

  ‘And that’s an underestimate, because it often gets hushed up and reported as something else. Heart attack. Cleaning his gun. Took the wrong medicine bottle. Coroners are human too.’ He had a slow simple way of talking, the easy unhurried accent of a countryman, the consonants soft, no pinched city sharpness in the vowels.

  ‘In a big mixed-up town like this one where you get all kinds of people doing all kinds of things in all kinds of conditions, there are all kinds of reasons why some of them come to the end of their tether. We rank about fifth or sixth in Great Britain in that department. All right.’ When he smiled, his long thoughtful face shifted into engaging new angles. ‘I said I wouldn’t bother with statistics. I won’t. Give you just one more though, in case you want to know how the Samaritans got started. About twenty years ago, the man who founded it, the Reverend Chad Varah, heard that there were at least three suicides a day in London. Ought to do something about that, he thought, and he hit on the idea of an emergency telephone service for the desperate, like you can dial 999 if your house is on fire or you trip over the cat and break a leg. It had to be that sort of easy number that people could remember. Something like 9000. Mansion House 9000, since he was going to run it from his church, St Stephen’s Walbrook, in the City. It had been damaged in the Blitz. Under the rubble somewhere was a telephone. When the rector dug it out and wiped off the dust, it already had the number he wanted, Mansion House 9000. Yes.’ He nodded to the murmur that came from his audience of about a dozen men and women, the youngest Sarah and the two girls with waterfall hair from the University, the oldest a bald grandfatherly man in a tweed suit like market day. ‘It was a miracle, you could say. That’s how it started. There are more than a hundred branches in this country now. This is one of the biggest. And the best, of course.’ he added, meaning it, not smiling.

  ‘Number 100, Peter, he’s the Director of this branch. You’ll meet him next week. He and Ralph, 255, and myself, 200, we act as counsellors, with consultants, psychiatrists, doctors, lawyers, social workers behind us. But the main thing of the Samaritans is – the Samaritans. People like you. Ordinary people. That’s where the need is. Ordinary people who know about love and tolerance and friendship. It’s the reaching out of one human being to another. A sharing of – well, love is what it is if you want it in one word.’

  He watched the faces of his audience. They watched him. The lopsided lady had relaxed her smile. The restless young woman with the black fur jacket and short black hair was still, her foot not swinging, her hands clasped round her knee.

  ‘No problem,’ he went on, ‘can be solved completely. But if there is love, you see, each problem can be tackled and dealt with, perhaps in some ramshackle way that’s better than nothing. Better than going under. We can’t run people’s lives for them. But we can try to put them in the way of doing it a bit better themselves. We try to give them back themselves. By being here. By paying attention. By listening. Those of you who get accepted as Samaritans’ – his eyes moved from one to the other as if he had decided already: you, not you, perhaps you? - ’you will learn that there’s only one thing you have to learn. All the rest follows. You listen, that’s all. All you have to learn, my dears, is just to listen.’

  The ‘my dears’ was not affected nor irritatingly folksy. It was natural and comfortable. How could Sarah ever explain this man to Brian? Should she even begin to try?

  How can I make it sound like this? If I can’t, he won’t understand. He might even – yes, if he’s wanting to be funny and cynical, he might even ... scoff.

  The stab of guilt with which she thought that of him was almost as if she had wished him dead.

  ‘Any questions at this point?’ 200 rubbed his eyes, pinching them at the corners and stretching his face as if he had just taken off glasses.

  The labrador girl lit a cigarette and blew a stream of smoke at him from her determined underlip. ‘What do we do? I mean, what are the duties? It’s all so vague.’

  ‘I know. Sorry, Meredith, I’m a lousy lecturer. The thing is, it’s hard to explain it, but it all gets quite clear when you start to work here.’

  ‘If we start,’ one of the college girls put in, without looking up from her knitting, a brown mass of something like a muffler which even her lover surely would never wear. ‘How do you pick who you pick?’

  ‘We just sort of – k
now.’ He spread his hands. ‘Some people are natural Samaritans. It sticks out a mile. These classes are not only for instruction. They help us to find out about you.’

  Some of the people tried to make their faces look kind.

  ‘There’ll be a test at the end, a faked distress call to see how you answer. But don’t panic. Even if you mess that up, you’ll get taken, if you’re the right kind.’

  ‘But what do we do?’ Meredith asked again.

  ‘Easiest thing is to explain what you don’t do. With clients, either on the phone or when they come in here – let’s see.’ He ticked off his fingers. ‘You don’t judge. You don’t get shocked. You don’t talk about yourself: “Oh yes, my aunt died of that last February.” You don’t sit round and gossip with other volunteers. It’s hard enough for someone in trouble to come through that door. If he finds a jolly group of people coffee-housing in here, he may go out and never be seen again. What else? You don’t probe. You try to find out what you can about a client, but not third degree. Name, address, black, white, co-habiting, have you been vaccinated. If he wanted that, he’d go to a government agency. He doesn’t want it. That’s why he comes to us. You don’t preach. You don’t criticize. If he says, “I just raped my stepsister,” you don’t say, “Oh how dreadful, you shouldn’t have done that.”’

  ‘What do you say?’ From a man at the back of the room.

  ‘Nothing really.’ 200 sent him an innocent smile. ‘You go mm-hm, or, “Tell me about it,” or something. Show him that you’ll listen if he wants to talk about it. He probably does. That’s why he’s here. Because he can’t tell anyone else. And when it’s told, you don’t give instant advice. You don’t say, “If I were you, I’d do so and so.” He’s not you. If he were, he wouldn’t be in his particular kind of trouble.’

  Meredith ground out her cigarette into the coffee-jar lid she was using as an ashtray. ‘You’ve told us a lot about what we don’t do,’ she said aggressively. ‘But you still haven’t said what we do.’

  ‘You listen.’ 200 remained unprovoked. ‘You listen and you try to—’

  ‘Anyone can listen.’

  ‘They can’t. You’re not listening to me now.’

  ‘I am, but it’s all so negative.’

  She was heating herself up like an automatic kettle. Perhaps it was the only kind of conversation she ever had.

  ‘They won’t take her,’ Sarah said to the man next to her, under cover of general questions and answers, punctuated by some semantic quibbling from the girl.

  ‘You never know.’ He had sideburns that would have been a beard if they had met in the middle of his chin. ‘Sometimes that sort turns out to be a better Samaritan than some of them who just sit and soak it all in like sphagnum moss.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘I’m doing this class as a refresher. I am a Samaritan, David, 520.’

  ‘Oh – you lucky.’

  ‘Yes. I don’t know why they took me.’

  Hullo, is that the Samaritans? Sarah saw herself in her little room at home, leaning over the back of the sofa to clutch the telephone. Yes, this is David, 520. And he would listen quietly while she babbled, I’m a failure, a wretched rotten failure. I’m a cheat and a liar and I don’t know what love is and I don’t know how to find out ... Horrified, she clamped down the lid on the dark secret snakes that could never be let out. Never given freedom, even in her own thoughts.

  Unable to make a dent in 200’s composure or logic, Meredith buttoned her labrador jacket and left to catch a bus. When the class was finished, Sarah and the knitting girl made coffee for everybody, and David, 520, drove her down to the Front Royal, since Brian was there for most of the night.

  The American insurance men were on the last lap of their convention. They had had their lunches and their conferences and their film presentations and their speeches and their awards and their golf. The hardier had trotted down the pebbled beach to the grey sea, gorilla-legged, throwing punches at the air. The joggers had jogged in their thirty dollar jogging shoes up and down the Esplanade under the uncommitted gaze of the old men sent out to sit in the shelters ‘and don’t come home till lunch’, who were more accustomed to the heel-and-toe regulars in creased cotton shorts and black gym shoes with galvanic Adam’s apples and corks in their fists.

  The wives of those who could or would bring them across the Atlantic had shopped for antiques and seen castles and had their hair done every day, for you could not step out of the Front Royal in December without being set upon by the wild wet demons that funnelled through the portico between the hotel garden and the veranda where the residents measured status by how long their jigsaw puzzles monopolized the card tables.

  On this last night there had been a banquet, with speeches and dancing. Most of the permanent residents had gone to bed like huffed turtles. Some of the Americans who had neither a wife nor one of the leggy casual girls who had been driving cars and handing round drinks all week were in the hotel bar. It had been en larged and newly landscaped, but was now so dark that you could not see the expensive knots in the panelling, the graining of the padded plastic leather that edged the bar like a safety dashboard. Sarah found Brian in there with a group of men. Anyone personable in Reception or Management was constrained to socialize at conventions.

  ‘Come and meet my husband.’ she had said, getting out of David’s loose-jointed car whose back seat was full of tools and coils of wire. ‘Come in and have a drink.’ And been sorry to feel relieved when he declined. Brian only liked people in cheap shapeless clothes if he had discovered them first. When he stood up, fair and smiling in his dinner jacket and white Italian polo neck, to signal to her across the dim smoky bar, she could imagine how his brow would have come down – Who the hell? – if David had been beside her in the doorway with his thick spattered spectacles and his green jacket that bagged like a smock.

  ‘How was it?’ Brian kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘Marvellous.’

  She said, tell you later, with her eyes, was introduced to the people at the big round table, and sat down next to a man who held on to his glass and drank sombrely with the corners of his mouth down, as if it was physic.

  He was staying at the Bay tree Hotel. When Brian was called away by an urgent porter, muttering and jerking his head forebodingly, the American said, ‘No offence to your nice husband, but it’s made the convention for me, staying in that little place. There’s been only half a dozen of us there, and the Wallaces – well, they have this knack of letting you alone, but being around if you want them. I’m coming back. I’m going to come back this summer. Got my room all set. Up under the roof with a dormer you can sit in and look at the ocean far off without seeing the beach or any of these mausoleums.’

  ‘Are you going to bring your wife?’ Sarah instantly regretted her random shot, but he nodded into his glass and said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’m going to bring Anne. No kids. Just us.’

  ‘Have you got pictures?’ Sarah was not a hotelier’s wife for nothing. He brought out his wallet in the dark and showed her laminated snapshots of which she could see not much more than the teeth.

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He shook his head at the picture of the woman. ‘I’ve got to show Anne the Baytree. You know something, Sarah? You want to know something about my wife?’ He tapped the picture. He was fairly drunk, with a not very likeable smell somewhere about him, either his skin or his clothes, but Sarah bent forward to listen, imagining herself a Samaritan, accepting, listening without judgement. ‘My wife is a very strange woman...’

  One of the bar waiters had come up in his red monkey jacket and striped waistcoat. Drinks were ordered. The people got up to leave. Someone across the table began to talk to Sarah. She did not immediately get the chance to turn back to the man and ask, ‘What were you going to tell me about your wife?’ When she did, his wallet was put away and himself with it. She said, ‘I’m sorry, what were you going to say?’ but he shook his head without looking at her, as if he did not r
emember or care.

  When Brian came back, she had to leave at once because one of his All Hells had broken loose and he would have to come in early tomorrow to start straightening out the bloody mess. He said that to the Americans at the table, who smiled politely, because he was a nice young Britisher, childishly flushed with petulance, although they knew as well as Sarah that he should keep quiet.

  He fumed in the car, telling her about the Assistant Manager and the politician’s party in room 119. His profile sped young and beautiful past the Esplanade hotels, the balconied flats, the dark cut hedges of the white mansions.

  ‘Don’t get so upset, darling,’ Sarah said. His personality was all wrong for hotels, but he had committed himself for five years, although he threatened every month to set light to his contract under Mr Rattigan’s nose. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘My fault! Of course it wasn’t my fault. How was I to know that bloody man was a reporter? If the Rat thinks I’m going to go grinning round with flowers and fruit to that tart of Fergusson’s to cover up for his gross, his crass, his crude ...’

  He grumbled on, sticking pins into a mental doll. Sarah stopped listening, and Brian did not listen properly to her when she talked about the Samaritans.

  ‘Glad you liked it,’ he said.

  ‘But you would too. I wish you —’

  ‘I’ve got the Rat to rescue. Keep him from being throttled by dissatisfied customers.’

  ‘Perhaps you would be a natural Samaritan. That’s what they say about people who are right for them. Do you think I could be? A natural Samaritan. If you are truly that, this man said, you could end up as a Samaritan Companion. They’re the heart of the organization. The élite, he called them.’

  Brian swung the wheel to turn down their steep little street where the houses stepped down one by one like a child going downstairs, then lifted her hand and kissed it. ‘That’s my good girl. Always go right to the top.’